How does Microsoft tempt students into its development tools bandwagon? By parking it outside the school yard and promising free love and software to the tiny tots.
The Redmond giant is teaming up with industry standards body the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) to give its student members gratis access …

COMMENTS

And why not...

Sounds like sound business sense to me. Get the into Microsoft products early. It's a win win for all... The students can buy more beer with their hard earned, and Microsoft get more exposure at the college/university level. Of course, those students will take their MS experience with them into the job market, post graduation.

I would imagine most companies will be pleased too... If their graduate engineers arrive complete with a couple of years MS dev tools experience, cool! They're already further up the learning curve.

Yep. Looks like win win win to me. Don't see any bad side.

Of the course, the open source boys won't be happy... "It's not fair" etc etc... Yeah, well, that's what you get when you give your stuff away for free... Nothing. Including no money to market your non-money-making 'product' to people with no money.

I'm the Java crowd would love to do the same thing, but... No money for marketing, since it's free anyway...

Yeah...

Only as far back as XP?

So my hopes of getting install disks for Windows 2-point-something in order to try to "grandfather" a Logitech ScanMan handheld scanner up to 98SE are for naught? I'm sure it would be an extremely educational experience. I've already learned never again to buy Logitech hardware.

Uh

Why would the IEEE support its young'uns heads be stuffed full of mush, full of security holes to boot?

Don't answer that. It's "realism" and "market forces" if it's not "massive bribes". But then maybe the IEEE *is* cheap. Much like micros~1 already not merely ballot-stuffed but shill-stuffed various countries' ISO committees. Wonder how that's working out for the rest of us.

Yawn

Normal practice, no?

Or is M$ the only company to make offers like this to students.

No different from many years ago, maybe still currently, a local garage used to give an old car to the schools engineering/metal work/mechanical dept, for the students to tinker with, and provide a mechanic/panel beater and tools to attend for a few hours each week. The pick of the students getting an apprenticeship if they desired.

Been around for a while...

This has been up and running for over a year now and has most things except Office Standard and Win 7. While the 'old' OSs such as 2003 server are there, 2008 server also makes an appearance in Standard, Enterprise and Datacentre.

It was good to be able to get a copy of VS2008, Project and Visio. If MS wants to give me corporate tools for free then I'm more than willing to use them.

So you're saying the students are too stupid to spot this?

So the students have a choice between the free Open Source tools, or the "free" Microsoft tools (after they've paid for their IEEE membership dues), and they decide to get "hooked" on the Microsoft tools.

Are they too stupid to figure this out, or are you too stupid to figure out why they might actually want to use the Microsoft tools?

Hmmm

Not only does this reek of desperation, when I was a student, none of us joined IEEE because it gave us no tangiable benefits.

I predict that only one student is going to join and then give copies of the software away to his classmates - who aren't going to use it anyway because they've got the important business of STUDYING to get on with...

Software list

Windows 7

I get MSDNAA through my higher education and it provides a Windows 7 x86 and x64 licence. Unless Microsoft has implemented some special requirement for the IEEE its up to the provider which software to offer so IEEE must have removed it for some reason.

The Right Early Software

Of course the last versions of Windows with sensible hardware requirements were Windows 98, and, better yet, Windows 3.11 with Win32s. With that kind of Microsoft software and today's technology, they could probably do a laptop for the Third World for under 100 dollars - and, therefore, under 100 Euros as well.

Why did MS bother?

If you're an "IEEE Student member", then you're likely a college student. If you're a college student, then your college only has to submit a little paperwork to offer MSDNAA to it's students. So exactly how many students interested in free MS stuff are IEEE members and study at colleges who don't participate in MSDNAA?

Already Free

FOSS development tools are already free, Free and will continue to be. So when you go to get that all important job your likely to be pocketing more of the companies money programming with FOSS simply because there isn't a huge burden on the companies deployment costs.